Small New York business making the most of its small plot to offer consumers more than 40 varieties of vegetables
Rhinebeck, NY (Special to The Hollywood Times) 1/4/24 – Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) reclaims the mutually beneficial relationship between farmers and people. Members pledge their support by signing up before the season starts. Farmers, in return, share the best of their harvests each week.
Green Owl Farm in Rhinebeck, NY, helps nurture this connection by offering a vegetable CSA for 2023. Green Owl also is partnering with Twin Ponds Flower Farm to offer weekly fresh flower bouquets. Both CSAs provide people with the opportunity to buttress local agriculture and build ties with a farm in your community.
Green Owl Farm is a sustainable, small-scale farm growing specialty long-season crops (saffron, turmeric, ginger, garlic, rainbow fingerling potatoes, luffa gourds, and bottle gourds). They direct-sell and wholesale these crops and the products made from them at the Rhinebeck Farmer’s Market and throughout the Hudson Valley.
They also grow more than 40 types of vegetables, with many varieties, for our 20-week CSA. And they do all of this on only two-thirds of an acre.
After farming for five years with a tractor, Green Owl Farm’s owner Suzanne Kelly decided to forg tilling and establish a permanent bed system. She works her beds with hand tools, with a focus on minimizing soil disruption and creating healthier nutrient dense plants.
“Our commitment to the land drives these practices –– sowing, cultivating and harvesting with our feet on the ground and, also, improving our soil’s vitality through tillage reduction, crop rotation, green manure cover cropping, compost and the use of only certified organic fertilizers,” said Keley. “We never use synthetic amendments or GMOs. We are proud to be Certified Naturally Grown.”
Kelly’s home is situated on a little over an acre of prime farmland, but for a long time she says she couldn’t imagine how to grow for the larger community with such little space.
“ I was eventually buoyed by an increasing number of growers working small parcels and left the academic world for a deeper connection with the land,” Kelly said. “I’m grateful to be part of a movement of farmers fostering stronger ties to the soil and our local communities.”
When she’s not in the field, she said she fuels her other earth-based passion of helping to grow a sustainable death care movement in the U.S.
“I’m the part-time administrator of the Town of Rhinebeck Cemetery where I collaborated with others to establish a Natural Burial Ground in 2014,” she said. “I also consult with green burial startups and write at the intersections of nature, gender, and death.”
